In March of next year I will be creating an installation at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto for If Walls Could Talk. This site-specific installation will be a collaboration between myself and Bruce Alcock, the Creative Director of Global Mechanic. Our project is called Canopy and will combine many different elements from yarn drawings, to paper sculptures, along with digital projection, and sound elements.

I began work on this project in September and have been sharing my progress on Instagram. To date I’ve been working on producing multiples of maple leaves cut from white paper, which will be suspended from the ceiling. For once I am not cutting these by hand (because that would be crazy), but instead have been using a digital cutter.

The ceiling in my apartment has been the stand-in space for my explorations in how to assemble and suspend the leaf clusters from the ceiling. The leaves are cut individually, and then fitted together during hanging. It looks beautiful.

A variation of this same process has been to come up with a composition of paper wings that will eventually evolve into a lantern. The image here is of a small hand-cut rough I did to mock up the idea.

I eventually created larger more refined wing shapes for the digital cutter to produce, and assembled these in a similar fashion to the maple leaf clusters. The bottom image is of a prototype I mocked up and is hanging in my dining room so I can contemplate its further development.

This project is very different than anything I’ve worked on previously. I sometimes find the scale of it staggering, because there are a long list of elements that still need to be made. It’s also been a bit weird working on something with a long term production schedule, versus the short term gratification of small projects I am used to.